Hands on: HTC One M8

Updated April 15 2014 - 1:13pm, first published 12:33pm
HTC One M8 Android smartphone.
HTC One M8 Android smartphone.

The sleek HTC One M8 ticks a lot of boxes for Android lovers, especially if you favour elegance over brash style.

We've reached another plateau in the Android smartphone arms race in terms of size, screen quality and performance. The mine's bigger than yours battle has stabilised around the 5-inch mark, letting phablets continue the push into larger territory. Razor sharp 1080p Super AMOLED and Super LCD smartphone screens deliver impressive picture quality. Meanwhile under the bonnet a 2-ish GHz quad-core powerplant keeps things running smoothly accompanied by 2 or 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 graphics chip.

When you reach a plateau like this it offers a good opportunity to assess the latest crop of smartphones according to the little differences which each Android vendor brings to the party. This is where HTC smartphones tend to shine, even though they're often forced to live in the shadow of the more ostentatious Samsung Galaxy S range.

Selling for $840 outright, the HTC One M8 comes with an impressive spec sheet;